Adelaide blog.Local and daily news. Opinions about current events in Adelaide, Australia and around the world.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Leadership

We certainly have enough mud in Victoria and Queensland to continue our current mudslinging approach to problem solving and crisis management for months. More fun that way. The consequences are irrelevant and we have some big economic issues riding on some of the mud being lobbed across the digital divide. Thinking at any depth seems something we wish to avoid at this point in time and we certainly are not showing a propensity for managing our crisis with any depth of thought. Amongst the mud we have the red herrings, white elephants and ideological detritus of former years, but we should not let that bother us. With social and interactive media everyone is an authority these days and it is more and more difficult to see real, solid , strong leadership ...I guess because the waters are muddied. Leadership is not about burying people in words that slime and make others feel righteous and when we seem to be looking for solutions that everyone is expecting that is management but it is not leadership. We have to climb out of our mudhole and we have to keep the economic momentum, so our decisions and recovery methods need to be thoroughly thought through in an expert fashion. We need to educate ourselves, because this is an unusual circumstance on top of the massive bushfires we had in Victoria last year and the floods which wiped out crops before. We need mentors, we need to work hard and we need to use our common sense. We are built on the back of mining , manufacturing and agriculture. All of those are taking big hits, have taken big hits and will continue to do so if we refuse to use an informed, methodical and expert thinking approach. Our next big income opportunity is growing our digital economy and we need to do that now because our other big income earners have taken broadsides. We cannot teach leadership. It is learned through experience and occasionally you get a Nelson Mandela as a gift in your life. We need to look for our leaders amongst this mud and even if we believe we have no leadership that is no excuse for us to mudsling and sustain the inaction on the pressing , long term issues we have because Australia has some very good thinkers, analysers and experts in the fields we currently need to draw on.